How to Start Your Awakening Process ｜ Spirituality for Beginners with Eckhart Tolle

I am. You know that without adding any qualifiers to it, without adding anything to the I am, it's the pure sense of being which is I am. Some people hate themselves. I don't like my body, I don't like who I am, I don't like this. What an awful way to live. I hate myself. It's much better to love yourself. So in New Age teachings, you learn to let go of this dysfunctional relationship with yourself. And then this is a good thing. It's much better to love yourself than to hate yourself. But you have to achieve that transition. It's not easy if the hating yourself has been deeply ingrained. You may have to put little stickers on your bathroom mirror. I love myself. Oh, yes. And everywhere. You are lovable. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Yes. And again, this is fine. It's a transitional stage. It's not the final stage. Sometimes in New Age things, it's the final stage. It's a lovely transitional stage, but really it's the stage of awakening is that you begin to let go of having a relationship with yourself so that you can just be yourself. And you have to be in the present moment in order to be yourself. And that is, you can sometimes learn by looking at an animal. The animal is at a pre-egoic stage. What we are moving towards or into is a post-egoic stage. Now, the animal, like your dog, is pre-egoic. The dog has consciousness, but not conceptual consciousness. The dog does not operate through mental concepts. In other words, the dog does not have an opinion about you. That's why you love the dog so much. And also, the dog does not have a relationship with himself or herself. Humans have, but I have not met a single dog that has a problem with self-esteem, for example. I have not met a single dog that has a problem with body image. Even the ugliest dog is okay. Because the split hasn't happened yet, the split into me and myself. So the dog, this is why the dog is often joyful. The slightest thing, sometimes you go, if you have a dog, you go away for 10 minutes and you come back home. The dog acts as if you had been away for 10 years. It's so happy. And the happy is contagious a little bit, the happiness of the wagging tail of the dog. Why is the dog so happy? Because the dog does not have a self. The dog is him, her, itself. The dog is, and then the tail goes, life is good. If the dog could say something, it would say, life is good. In the present moment, just give me my food and then it's even better. So the humans, they love to be with their animals because it gives them a little bit of, a little glimpse of self-transcendence, because when they look into the eyes of the dog, they are not being judged. And that feels good. And you can sense, by looking at the eyes, you can sense the being of the dog. Wow, now, the dog, what you really love in, just an example, dog, cat, what you really love in the dog is not the outer surface of the dog, although it's lovely to the touch and all that, yes, but you know there is something that you cannot see that you relate to when you look into the eyes of a dog. That is the essence of the dog. What you love is actually the consciousness of the dog, which has no ego in it. It exists at a pre-egoic state. You love the consciousness of the dog. And when you look in the eyes of it, you feel a little bit, you connect a little bit to that in yourself for a few seconds. When you're not, you don't need any defense mechanism or anything like that when you relate to a dog. Although there are some humans with huge egos, I have observed a few, who relate to their pet through their ego, but that's another story. And that's a sad story. They have an ego relationship. I knew a woman who would, in the evenings, she would put food out for her cat, would go out, the cat would be in the garden, and she had the window open. That was a neighbor of mine years ago. And she would put the food out, and this woman had a very accomplished person, but a gigantic ego. She would, she put the food of her cat out, and then if the cat didn't come, because cats have many things to do out in the garden, and it was dinner time for the cat, and she put the plate there, and she was sitting there waiting for the cat to come, and 15 minutes passed, and then she said, okay. Then she would close the window, said if she doesn't want to see me, I don't want to see her. Oh my God. She has an ego relationship with her cat. So a relationship with yourself, that eventually is transcended, so that you can simply be in the present moment, not, and let's go deeper now, so that in the present moment, which is a portal into the awakened state, in this present moment, let's see who or what are you in the present moment, without reference to any thought, without reference to any thought about who you are. That's an interesting pointer. In other words, what does it feel like to be yourself, without remembering your past, or thinking about the future, just in this moment. You don't need to remember your email address or anything. It's not necessary now, or what you ate yesterday. Without reference to past and future, what does it, do you disappear, or what is left of you without the memory of the narrative that usually you describe as my life? Without that memory of that you need to revive continuously, without that, what does it feel like to be you? And I cannot answer that. I can only give it to you as a pointer and slow down a little bit as I talk, so that you can perhaps inquire, investigate internally what it feels like. What is the most essential thing about your identity? Are you still there when you don't think about your life, like now? Are you still there, and what is that? I'm not going to answer it, and I don't expect a conceptual answer. So the, that's me. There was a spiritual teacher in India whose favorite meditation was asking his disciples to ask themselves, who am I? You can also ask yourself, what am I? Who or what? What am I? What am I? But don't answer it verbally, but feel or sense what it means to be alive, or to be you. What am I? There's a, there's a gap in the stream of thinking, then what, what is there when there's a gap in the stream of thinking, like now? And in that gap, there's a, there's a stillness, yes? There's also a sense of, there's something there, but it's hard to describe. There's a sense of presence, of beingness, and in that sense of presence, of beingness, you know that you are. You know, you can say, I am. You know that without adding any qualifiers to it, without adding anything to the I am, it's a pure sense of being, which is I am. It's very peaceful. You need an alertness to sustain it just for a little bit. Without the alertness, you will immediately fall back into the stream of thinking. But it's not, you don't use willpower to stop your thinking mind. That doesn't really work. So you don't hold your breath in order to stop thinking. That does, it might work for a little while, but then you think even more. It's like a boiling kettle. Hold the lid on a boiling kettle. Just alertness. And so Jesus said, as I said at the beginning, and what I say to you, I say to all, stay awake. In some translations, it's translated as stay alert. What I say to you, I say to all, stay alert. That alertness is consciousness without thought. It seems at first just to be an absence. It seems at first like, okay, stillness, one could say is the absence of noise in a stillness, in absence. It might seem at first as a kind of nothingness. And yet, if you stay with it for a little bit, just a few more seconds, stay alert, then you can sense it's not just the absence of something. It's also the presence of something, but not so much the presence of something, but the sense of presence itself, not of something.